


Feathers on my last breath

by beagain



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bruce Wayne WAS a Good Parent, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Bruce is also very sad, Bruce’s POV, Gen, Jason is Red Hood, Liberal uses of quotes, Lots of Talk about Jason death, No betas just words, Timeline? I don’t know her, and other things, emotional talk, he is also really sad and hurt, is it too late? Read to find out, now he’s trying, then he wasn’t
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26266741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beagain/pseuds/beagain
Summary: A conversation in a rooftop of Gotham, between father and son.(In which painful truths are revealed and everything hurts, but it’s better to know that to keep wondering, and sometimes that precious bond is not enough for forgiveness, when there’s more damage than love)
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 10
Kudos: 99





	Feathers on my last breath

He finds Red hood in a rooftop alone. He doesn’t have the helmet on and he seemed calm, smoking rings into the cold night air. Almost in peace, if Bruce didn’t know better. He lands beside him without a sound.

“ _Hope is the thing with feathers_ ” Jason recites softly, poetry like melancholy on his tongue. He was staring at Gotham and the night lights hit his face. His freckles stand out. He's so precious, so vulnerable in the moment. So much his son. 

Bruce’s eyes prickled behind his cowl. Most days he would instantly deny the weakness of emotion, the hold of memories. Not that day, though, not while looking at Jason’s back, as wide and unknown as it was familiar. 

Not with Jason carefully repeating poetry, like afternoons spent by the light of the fires of the library and the weights of a thousand books, like passing the heirloom of wisdom collected through the years by his father and grandfather and their father before them, with his own son. A legacy without pain. 

“ _That perches in the soul_ ” Batman continues in a raspy whisper, almost no gravel to the words “ _And sings the tune without the words_ ” His heart is beating too fast. He has been in fights that didn’t give him the rush this moment does. He has been choked and he has searched for air with less desperation that he tries to reach Jason now.

He was always too far from him, since that fateful day.

“ _And never stops,_ ” Jason cuts him off. He bites out the words like bullets, like memories sharpened into wounds, “ _at all_ ” He scoffs derisively, already out of his reach. Bruce yearns, but doesn’t know what to do, how to fix it. He has a gut feeling that the situation has gone beyond his control but he doesn’t _know_ “Well, it stopped alright. I ain’t got no feathers no more”

The usual beligerance almost makes him laugh, like it always did in those golden days, if not for the meaning. 

Is he…

“Not for me” Bruce tries. He is no good with words, not the genuine ones. He is a taught liar, a master crafter of manipulation but honesty strips him raw of eloquence. He always is too blunt or too cryptic, saying too much or too little and Jason…

The streets taught Jason how to sell a lie but it’s at his rawest when Jason shines the most. Somehow when incensed Jason is able to shed himself of insecurities and self-denials, speaking of realities with a charming mix of educated eloquence and frank colloquialism. Even swear words become more than vulgar, more than inappropriate in his little boy’s lips, like spices. Bruce was always out of his depth with him. 

“I noticed” His words are pointed, clear. A paragraph contained in barely two words. Words, for Jason, are often used like weapons. He had a gift for them. For Bruce they are tools he is specially clumsy with, no matter how much he tries. It’s frustrating. He fires. “You didn’t wait until my body was cold to get yourself a new bird.” 

The words hit home.

“It wasn’t like that” Bruce doesn’t know how to explain, how to transmit the death of his soul to him. He isn’t capable of opening that chasm of agony, that Pandora box filled with the memory of an infinite weight in his heart, his dead son in his arms, without losing himself. 

He doesn’t know what to say to not lose this progress, this step in the reconciliation. Bruce isn’t a religious person, and a jew to boot, but Christianity is common enough in the media for him to know about the tale of Prodigal son. A son, thought lost, who came back home with no explanation or apology, and his father, who didn't hesitate in opening his arms to him. Only his eldest was concerned with the specifics but the father refused to greet his prodigal son with anything but welcoming joy. 

He always thought the father was a bit of a fool. Kind, but blinded by love. The elder brother was right in his concerns.

“I heard that before.”

However, looking at Jason, seeing the traces of nightmares in the bags under his eyes, the traces of fear in his trembling hands, the echo of horrors in his hard, bright, stubbornly dry eyes, Bruce wonders who the real fool is. 

“No.” He denies “No, you haven’t”

The father who forgave and regained a son. 

“I suppose that’s nice and all” Jason cuts him off, flicking his cigarette off the roof and starting to stand. It’s clear in his tone that he doesn’t believe a word Bruce says.

Or the one who didn’t, and got him back only to lose him all over again.

The prospect terrifies him. 

“Jason” Bruce rasps out, trying to get out the words before he leaves. Before he disappears like he never was and Bruce wakes up to a cold grave and a dead son again. “Come back home” He sees how he stops, his back a mountain before him. He wouldn’t fit under his cape anymore and it’s like a wound on his side. What he lost to time and to tragedy. But Jason stops and Bruce almost chokes on the sudden hope “ _Please_ ”

(His son grew up without him and Bruce already missed so much, is he really going to miss even more?)

“Why?” 

The question has a hidden meaning and Bruce can’t find it. He can barely think over the beating of his heart, over the warnings of a chance, of what consequences failure to answer correctly will be. He has never envied a man more than he did Martian Manhunter at that moment. Why _what?_

_Why did you choose the Joker over me?_

He barely remembers that outcome of that night, his son like a wraith with a gun to his murderer head, his words an absolution and a curse and Bruce- he couldn’t deal with any of it, with what he wanted and what was right so-

Batman took the lead that night. And Batman didn’t kill. He couldn’t. It was the line that allowed himself to act as he does. And Bruce knew himself. He would never _stop_.

(And then there wouldn’t be a Batman anymore. Just another madman with a vision, terrorizing Gotham)

_Why should I listen to you?_

Bruce wishes Jason had ever listened to him. No, that’s a lie. Jason has always heard every word he said -Bruce wished many times to take a lot of them back- but he never obeyed them. Not blindly. 

When he was young, Jason always wanted to listen to him, about anything. It was a little difficult for him, because he was too eager to tell him everything too. He was so dear to his heart. They used to have conversations about anything under the sun in his study. They would talk for hours, not about Robin or Gotham or anything mission-related. Just the two of them, father and son. It reminded Bruce of his father. The memory didn’t hurt. It felt like a warm caress instead of a cold loss for the first time. 

Bruce misses that. Bruce misses a lot. 

_Why did you leave me to die?_

He doesn’t know. He never did. He used to wonder, at first. His brain, so acclaimed for hosting the best detective in the world, the one trait of his he was always proud of, his brain couldn’t process it. Bruce couldn’t understand.

He was supposed to be a hero. Batman. But that day he wasn't. That day he was eight and his socks were wet with his parents blood. Except worse because he was late already. There was no fated moment, _no chance_

He was too late and Bruce couldn’t understand how he had died and didn’t notice until the destroyed body of his son was right in front of him.

That moment with all the rubble will always, no matter what, be his biggest failure. The one he could never recover from.

_Why did you not noticed I was gone?_

He was too late. He saw too little. He-

Bruce can visit his parents’ grave. It’s cold stone, familiar, almost comfortable in a way. He can stare at their headstone and miss them and remember the good. Bruce cannot bring himself to visit Jason’s grave more than once a year. More than a few minutes.

It brings him pain. It shames him. He can only remember his broken body, the dark freckles scattered with blood, deformed and hidden beneath bruises that were still forming. Still growing unlike his dead boy. The silence interrupted only by his ragged breathing- and his lungs ached in loneliness, his traquea trembled in sobs for the lack of another-

The way he got cold, so slowly, rigid and _wrong_ in his embrace. The agony and disbelief, more painful and full of a realized fear than any substance Scarecrow could think of. 

"Please" He says, instead of an answer to the hidden question. 

He did it all over again. Alone, he left his boy _alone_ time and time again. No excuse could ever be enough. 

He died on that warehouse. He’s been walking and breathing and doing things like a puppet, carried only by the knowledge that if he didn’t, he would hurt others. He was a shadow and he claimed like a nightmare all what he had left. Alfred, Dick. Later, Tim. 

Now, Jason. 

_Jason_.

"You know, for all that the Joker broke my wings I still had feathers. A useless, bloody mess of them but I had them." He says, his back still turned to him. He chuckles, a sad sound nothing like his boisterous laugh as a child. He always had that edge to his humor, just the smallest amount of mean-spiritedness and it never failed to make Bruce lose it. "But you taught me better than that."

A tilt of the head and the moonlight hitting just right on the irregular line of his neck, the cut a precise incision but the edges shaped oddly, like a personalized shuriken. It is at less than an inch from his yugular, too close to be an accident. 

(Did he…? But that’s impossible, Bruce would _never-_ )

“You’re my son” It’s all Bruce has to offer. It rings hollow, after seeing that.

“No, I’m not.” Jason shuts down quickly “My father was Willis Todd, just another scumbag in Crime Alley. He was an asshole and didn’t care about my mom and me one bit but at least he was decent enough to not lie about it.” _Not like you_ , his eyes change to a sick wet green and accuse him. 

It angers him.

“I adopted you”

It shouldn’t. A good father tries to understand and console first. Bruce isn’t good enough so it does and he doesn’t know what to do about it. Anger naturally comes out as agression for him but the thought of violence towards Jason-

_A wide gaze disbelieving. A pained, choked sound. Those bright green eyes, poisoned but so bright, so alive, diming._

_Terror like a shot to the heart with Scarecrow fear gas._

_A laugh like a nightmare and a bomb. Panic and instinct making him move when his mind is_ dead _. Toolatetoolatetoolate like a mantra, hours later- after the shock, after retching, after the denial of a past actions- in a warehouse, now only ruins. Searching with fear clawing him inside out. Toolatetoolatetoolate._

It makes him **_sick_ **. 

"Convenience and loneliness” There’s devastation barely hidden beneath Jason's borrowed rage. A sort of hopelessness Bruce is familiar with and at the same time, completely alien to. _You used me and I fell for it,_ it's written as betrayal in his son's face. 

His eyes don’t shine, Bruce realizes. 

They did since the first night, when he was a little thief with arms full of Batman’s tires. They shone as Robin, even behind the masks. They shone as red Hood, even if they were infested with a mad light, a poisonous green. 

They didn’t in Ethiopia, the lifeless husks they were. They didn’t after the batarang. 

(Because that scar couldn’t have come from anything else, couldn’t been a mistake or friendly fire. Bruce was a detective and even when it begged it not to, his mind was too used to putting together clues to deny proof like that.)

 _I did that,_ he thinks and feels the truth hit. A dagger he didn’t deserve to evade. His words land next with devastation. Was that what Jason really thought about him? That he didn’t care? Was Bruce that bad of a father tha-

(The evidence didn’t lie)

“I took you in because you gave me hope.” He says softly “Because Dick left and I was alone, because you were there and you made me laugh on the worst day of the year” Jason is not moving, staring at him with those fake _dull_ eyes and an immobile chest. “It was selfish of me but I believed I was helping you, too”

He was so still it looked like he died again, right in front of him, and all that Bruce had left was a familiar corpse.

“There’s not a single feather left in me Bruce” Jason said softly after a while. He is crying in silence, and it feels so wrong. “Huh” A whisper, so soft and sad. Defeated, quiet. _Wrong_ “I guess that’s why”

“Why what?”

Bruce is terrified for the answer

“You have no more use of me.” No. That’s not true “So you don’t want me. It’s that simple”

No. 

_Never_

“it was never about use"

Jason doesn’t miss a beat.

"Then why I was remembered as a soldier instead of a child?" 

And Bruce can't answer. Words, once again, fail him. He watches Jason go in tortured silence, in defeated regret, in immeasurable fear. He watches how tears fall silently from his cheeks, in beats like a bleeding wound. 

He lost, once again. 

Jason looks at him, something intrinsic in him defeated and waits. But Bruce is unable to answer. How can he, when he can't dwell on the past? 

(How could he put a plaque that read a good son below his Robin's uniform, when the cloth was forever ruined with the stain of his mistakes. 

How can he think of the boy he lost, when he's drowning with every breath in the empty space beside him? 

How can he tell his brave, brave son of his pain, when he is already covered in wounds? How can he burden him with his pain, when he already suffered so much?) 

Jason nods at his silence, unsurprised and hurt all the same, and starts walking away, with a back so tense and footsteps so silent that it looks like he's preparing himself for an attack. It lowers his reaching hand, the lack of trust between them. It tastes bitter, foul. 

Bruce remembers gaining his Jaylad’s trust the first time. The clumsy steps of an oblivious father and a traumatized child finding each other. The first time Jay leaned into his touch, instead of flinching away. The first time he initiated it, with the same face he will later adopt as Robin facing a tough decision. He was so brave.

When he hid in his cape because he was cold or he wanted to jump scare Commissioner Gordon. When he got clingy and sick, after hours of stubbornly denying any weakness. When he threw a cheeky smile at him, full of mischief and surrounded by chaos. 

(When his things from school came from the mail and Bruce feel it hit again. When the Manor feels like a mausoleum and Bruce would kill for a ghost, for a glimpse. When he wakes, waiting for a little sneak to try and attack him on Father’s Day with a shout and a gift only to remember he's gone) 

"I could not survive a dead son" Bruce says, finally. "I could a dead soldier" 

Jason stops on the edge of the roof, grappling gun already in hand. He gazes back, that unsettling green shining neon in the darkness of their city. His eyes are no longer wet, but there’s tears-track on his cheeks still, bright under the moonlight. Like someone carved them. They are dull, and tired. 

"I'm alive" he says softly. Almost as if he's reciting poetry again. "Yet, my grave stands" 

He jumps and Bruce lets him go in silence. In mourning. 

In regret

**Author's Note:**

> Those two are always making me cry so now I am making you cry. It’s a cry-fest all around. 
> 
> I love it when fics talk about how much Bruce love(d) Jason and how much Jason loves Bruce. So this mess in a mix-up between those marvelous healing fics and the calling-out-B-for-his-bullshit ones. It’s open-ended, so maybe they have more emotional healing talks, or maybe Jason walks away forever and heals away. I opened those emotional right up to avoid infection and so my work here is done. 
> 
> The quotes come from a poem by Emily Dickinson.


End file.
